The final words on the East Timorese language choices

12. As for the Planning Commission’s consultation being made "with funding from the Irish people", the National Institute of Linguistics would be mortified to think that the Irish people, who suffered the humiliation of having their national language marginalized and driven to near extinction by the British and by Irish with a cultural cringe towards Anglo-Saxon civilization, support the idea of their taxes being contributed to similar programmes of linguistic and cultural abolitionism in East Timor. The cultural importance of Portuguese in East Timor is equal to that of Gaelic in Ireland, though neither language is the vernacular of the majority. Nach bhfuil Seán Ó Foghladha eolach ar an nath "Tír gan teanga, tír gan chroí"? Would Dr Foley also suggest that further public funds be used to depopulate what remains of the Gaeltachtaí and abolish the teaching of Irish as a ‘useless’ and ‘anachronistic’ subject in the schools of Ireland?

13. It is unfortunate that Dr Foley misunderstands and caricatures my work as "perform[ing] impossible contortions" in the same breath as he praises the efforts of José Lobato (the son of Nicolau — not "Nicholas" — Lobato) in having Tetum recognized as an official language. Since I was the person who taught Mr Lobato Jnr to write and better appreciate the national language, I might perhaps claim some reflected credit for his victory, in which I rejoice without the slightest prejudice to my support for Portuguese. East Timor, as everyone not blinded and soured by pro-Indonesian and Anglocentric loyalties knows, needs both Tetum and Portuguese to be fully itself.

14. Lastly, it is somewhat puzzling to us why a person with a tertiary education like Dr Foley would be presuming publicly to argue with a linguistics institute about matters about which he is ill-informed when not patently ignorant. As linguists trained to have respect for the expertise of others, we at the Instituto Nacional de Linguística would like to assure readers of Online Opinion that we do not propose to lecture environment specialists about their own discipline.

Should any other amateur care to proffer similar distortions of the linguistic and cultural identities of East Timor, the new nation’s language authority will be happy to correct them with scientific facts.